Confirmation? Maybe…

The more I think about this, the more I think that the whole speech makes a lot more sense if there is some kind of credible commitment from Pakistan on the table that we don’t know about just yet. It’s sheer speculation, but think about it — a smaller-than-recommended number of troops for a pretty large cost when budgets are already busted thanks to a tanking economy and a healthcare bill in the works… it seems almost silly unless Obama has some kind of arrangement in the works with Pakistan. And it bears repeating — it’s Pakistan that will ultimately determine the success or failure of this operation.

That was during Obama’s speech at West Point, on Monday. This morning, Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke with several network morning shows. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reports:

On the Pakistani nuclear issue, says Gates: ” “Well I think I’ll just leave it that based on information available to us we’re comfortable.” Translation: we know whether the nukes are, and we’re going to seize them if anything destabilizing happens, even though we’ll never admit this, and even though Pakistan’s military doesn’t think we know.

I’d say this lines up nicely with my hypothesis above, although I’d disagree with Ambinder’s “translation.” Pretending that the Pakistani military “doesn’t think we know” something that Gates might by slyly alluding to on an American national network broadcast is a little naive, I think. Rather, I think it’s fair to speculate that Gates is uncomfortable going into particulars about any knowledge of or arrangement concerning Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, but his language on the subject suggests that something is going on, and my own personal guess is that the nukes are part of some deal regarding Afghanistan that the U.S. is currently working on with Pakistan.

We’ll see. Or, I guess, I hope we’ll see, because I’d love for a prediction I made publicly to turn out to be 100 percent correct.